Musculoskeletal disorders, back and joint pain, and poor spinal posture are known occupational hazards for housekeepers in the hospitality industry. Hotel workers are nearly 40% more likely to be injured on the job than other service-sector employees, and housekeepers have the highest overall injury rate of any category of hotel employee. In addition to diminishing staff members' quality of life, these disorders are costly for employers, weighing on productivity and increasing workers compensation costs.
When making a bed, the housekeeper positions the comforter into all four corners of a clean duvet cover and spreads the two evenly over the bed, fluffing them multiple times to eliminate wrinkles and position the duvet symmetrically atop the bed. When unmaking a bed, the housekeeper separates the dirty duvet cover from the comforter by grabbing the corner of the cover and pulling away the heavy duvet. This separation requires great physical exertion from the back, waist, hips, arms, shoulders, wrists, and hands.
Housekeepers constantly stoop, bend, and twist when changing bed linen; time pressure magnifies these risks and causes overexertion. Furthermore, hotels are investing more in upscale, oversized bedding with increasingly heavy and cumbersome duvets (upwards of 15 pounds). Particularly for oversized bedding, two people are often required to stretch a wrinkled sheet or cover a comforter with a duvet cover. A second person is not always available, however, and one person must often accomplish the task alone.
Prior attempts to reduce the strain of applying and removing the duvet cover include the one disclosed in WO 2012/084554 A1, which uses one or a pair of self-locking plastic devices mounted to either side of a bed frame or a box spring towards the head of the bed. Each of the plastic devices has a first gripping surface on a base and a second gripping surface on a moveable element rotatable about a rotational axis with respect to the base. The duvet or sheet is held between the first gripping surface and the second gripping surface when the movable element is rotated toward the base.
As previously mentioned, however, changing consumer trends have led the hotel industry to invest in oversized luxury bedding, including taller box springs, resulting in varying duvet overhang lengths that make the devices disclosed in WO 2012/084554 A1 undesirable or inoperable. If the device is mounted to the bottom of the bed frame, the duvet may not hang down far enough to reach the device. If the device is instead mounted to the box spring to ensure the duvet can reach the device, the device is visible to hotel guests, who may find the device aesthetically displeasing or be tempted to tamper with the device.